Corey Van Landingham | Poetry

Love Letter to Nike Alighting on a Warship

I could not know how like the drone you would become,
standing below your grandeur, in 2008, at the Louvre.

Eyeless, mouthless—Good Girl! Broken Goddess!
You were already, were still, the woman commemorating

a man’s war. All breast to mark man’s arête, Hellenistic
in a fierce headwind, drama and theatre. You, sentinel,

see all. Here, wrote Rilke, there is no place that does not
see you. Funny how Apollo, god of truth and light,

becomes your brother without a head. Poetry and war
speechless. The world—Dickinson in a letter—is sleeping

in ignorance and error. At night, now, the unmanned machines
still have to, somewhere, touch down. Grounded,

men stroke them with their own hands. Stand back, a docent
warned me then. You’re getting, he said, too close to her.

Love Letter to Nike Alighting on a Warship originally appeared in The Kenyon Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, as well as multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A former Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford University, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, Best New Poets 2012, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is currently the 2015-2016 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

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